Every season is basketball season. Truly. The WNBA season ended Oct. 18, when the Las Vegas Aces defeated the New York Liberty in Game 4 of the finals, and this week, the NBA season tipped off.

It’s the league’s seventh season with jersey sponsors, a practice that, until recently, was fairly uncommon in the US. The NBA was the first of the Big Four to give brands space on its jerseys, and while the NHL and MLB have followed suit, the NFL still doesn’t allow these types of deals.

The price tags can be high—some as much as stadium naming rights—but the NBA has locked in a handful of new jersey sponsors for this season.

Welcome to New York: Sphere—Las Vegas’s new spherical entertainment venue—is coming to New York…sort of. Madison Square Garden Sports Group, which owns the Knicks and the Rangers, announced Tuesday that Sphere Entertainment will be the official jersey-patch sponsor of the Knicks this season.

• As part of the deal, the Sphere logo will be featured on the Knicks’ game jerseys, practice jerseys, warm-up shirts, and jerseys sold to the public.
• The Knicks were among only four NBA teams that didn’t have a patch sponsor last season after partnering with Squarespace for five seasons prior, per CNBC.
• Terms of the deal weren’t made public, but Sports Business Journal reported earlier this year that the Knicks were looking for $30 million a year.
• James Dolan owns both MSG Sports Group and Sphere.

Feeling the heat: Something similar played out earlier this month when the Miami Heat announced Carnival Cruise Line as its jersey sponsor for the season. Micky Arison owns the team and is chairman of Carnival Corporation.

Continue reading here.—AM

A seamless customer experience is a huge selling point for brands—one that can make a marketer’s job easier.

In the name of improving customer experiences, Amazon and Panera are turning to large language models and conversational AI to improve ordering. The success they’ve seen so far is undeniable, but is this really the future? Learn how this new phenomenon could change the game.

The ad rebound appears to be real.

This week, Meta reported record-breaking revenue in Q3, bringing in more than $34 billion, up more than 23% year over year. That’s the most it’s ever made in a quarter since going public.

Ad impressions delivered across Meta’s suite of apps grew 31% year over year, and the average price of an ad went down 6%. The company expects to bring in between $36.5 and $40 billion next quarter.

Meta’s earnings are in line with other tech companies that saw gains this quarter: Google, that other advertising giant, had similarly good news, announcing this week that it too saw double-digital revenue growth. Similarly, Snap reported a 5% revenue uptick year over year following two quarters of declines.

The growth signals that the digital ad market is starting to pick up following a year of economic uncertainty that caused some marketers to cut back on spending. Meta is seeing “continued strong advertiser demand in key segments,” CFO Susan Li said during the company’s earnings call.

Still, Li cautioned that the company has seen “more volatility” and “softer ad spend” at the start of Q4, when asked by an analyst whether “unfortunate geopolitical activity” is impacting the company’s advertising business.

Keep reading here.—RB

Each week, Marketing Brew recaps what people are talking about on social media, the trends that took over our feeds, and how marketers are responding.

Ski brand rebrand: A New York ski resort’s whimsical rebrand is being ill-received on the internet, with marketer and TikToker Ashwinn Krishnaswamy calling it “one of the biggest branding disasters” he’s ever come across. Commenters are also calling out what they see as a confusing membership program, with the highest tier including an “initiation fee” that costs $150k, while others said the copy seems AI-generated and graphics look like they were done with Canva.

Swift backtrack: Outdoor Voices compared its fleece to Taylor Swift’s Folklore era on Instagram with photos from the album before the post disappeared. A good reminder to all marketers: you’re never more than one post away from trouble, trouble, trouble.

One brand that’s doubling down on its Swift content? The NFL.

BookTok: We haven’t seen content like this since Heidi Montag. Influencer Addison Rae was seen reading Britney Spears’s new memoir while walking down the street, prompting some to wonder if it was all part of a staged paparazzi shoot to promote the book. But if it gets Britney more book sales, then this is all we have to say.

Your weekly dose of humbling: From millennial social captions to influencer speak, no one was safe from parody this week. But if you made it through all your client calls without telling any of them that you love them, you may be doing better than you think.—KH

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

’Tokking shop: TikTok published part one of a starter guide for e-commerce small businesses on the platform.

Inspo: Seven influencer campaigns to spark ideas for your next one.

Semantics: An overview of the difference between remarketing and retargeting.

Early-bird alert: The holiday season has already started for some Gen Z and millennial shoppers. Get crucial seasonal insights in PMG and GlobalWebIndex’s Holiday Shoppers Insights Report, available right here.*

BFCM blueprint: Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) get a lot of attention from marketers, but the weekend between those days tends to be less active than you might expect. Consider timing your sends then. Explore more holiday marketing tricks in our collab with Intuit Mailchimp here.*

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

Stories we’re jealous of.

• The New York Times wrote about how Carolyn Bessette Kennedy has become a “ghost influencer” and source of style inspiration online, years after her death.
• The Atlantic looked at companies’ decisions to speak out (or not) on the Israel-Hamas war and the value of corporate statements.
• The Wall Street Journal wrote about how Nike is losing ground to competitors in the athletic- and streetwear categories.